Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill

Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) Link to this

I thought I would take an initial call on the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill. Obviously, it probably would have been more convenient to deal with the three pieces of legislation at once because there are some particular issues that relate to all three bills. When we get to the Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill, I think that will be dealt with relatively quickly since we were not able to join them up together.

The two major issues in respect of the electoral finance legislation are in relation to the question of third-party limits on expenditure. It was very important to this side of the House that some movement was shown in that regard. There was some debate at the Electoral Legislation Committee about whether advertising made a difference in terms of the outcomes of elections, and we were referred to a number of pieces of research that have been done in this particular area. The statement that the royal commission made back in 1986, I think, is as valid today as it was then. It said that the question is not so much whether third-party expenditure is entirely responsible for the result of the vote; the real issue at the end of the day is whether there is the perception that the use of vast sums of money in order to influence the outcome is sufficient. Is the perception sufficient to give the impression that the outcome of the election has been affected by the spend, and does that lead to a lack of confidence in the integrity of the electoral system itself? I am very strongly of the view that it is important to have third-party expenditure caps because it does not make it effective for the caps that apply to political parties and to candidates if a third party can simply enter into the fray with negative advertising against the other side, without any limitation on what it is that it could do.

We had quite a lengthy debate about what the cap would be, and not many submissions on this bill related to third-party expenditure. It was interesting because the real debate was around the lack of a cap on the third bill, which is why it would be more convenient to debate all three bills together, but there you go. I think the reason that the focus of the submissions was on the referendum legislation rather than on the electoral finance reform legislation was that in the referendum situation there is access to television advertising. That is where that uncapped expenditure would come into play. I think it would not take much for people to work out how much association between the political party advertising and the referendum advertising could be made to look like an extension of a political party’s campaign. When we think about it in terms of some of the interests of those who will be entering into the debate on the electoral system itself, we see that obviously some parties have a greater interest in the MMP outcome being retained.

Moving back to why it is important to have spending caps on registration but more so on third-party expenditure, we need to go back to the 2005 general election. That is one that obviously I campaigned in, and it was one that I found to be an extremely unpleasant election campaign. In fact, in all of the election campaigns that I have stood in, that is the one that really will go down in my memory as the most misogynist and self-interested campaign. There was the promotion of self-interest that I never came across on street-corner meetings in all the years that I have stood. I have been a member of Parliament for 20 years this year, and I have never apart from that election had people on street-corner meetings asking what was in it for them. That was the only time.

It was generated out of a campaign that had been run on three different levels. The first level was designed to make sure that the campaign expenditure fell outside the regulated period. That was number one. They were the billboards. I do not know whether colleagues remember the billboards, but the one that sticks in my mind—sticks in my throat, actually—was the one headed up “Iwi/Kiwi”. All of the billboards were designed to send a message to the public of New Zealand to create a sense of division—“them and us”. Everyone was exposed to “them and us” all the way through that year, and it started at the beginning of the year with the campaign billboards. Who designed those? Was it Steven Joyce before he came to Parliament? [Interruption] Yes, and who were those people from Australia—Crosby/Textor, that is right. They were responsible for developing this campaign, which set off the year with a real antagonistic view—“us and them”, and the “Iwi/Kiwi” one was designed to cause the most racial division in our country that I think we have seen for a very, very long time.

We had the photoshopped image, the very nasty photoshopped image, of the Prime Minister of the day, up against this very warm and engaging image of Don Brash—we all remember Don Brash looking warm and engaging—and that was the dichotomy set up through the billboards. That was the groundwork done and it was done deliberately. It set the stage for the rest of the campaign, but it was designed to take us into the election campaign period where the expenditure would start to count. National spent a fortune, millions of dollars, on this campaign all around the country in order to set the scene for what was to come. What was to come also included another deliberate avoidance of our electoral finance laws and that was about National’s engagement with the Exclusive Brethren. We know that, because of The Hollow Men—and I recommend that people read that book again. I have been recommended lately to read it again, and I am going to do that over the summer holidays. We need to be reminded about who knew what, when, how, and why, and it is very explicit in terms of the trail of emails exposed in that book.

That is exactly what happened. The Exclusive Brethren went to the Electoral Commission with a design for their pamphlet, which had Don Brash’s face on it, promoting him as the next Prime Minister of New Zealand. When they found out that that would have to have National Party approval, and that it would count against National’s campaign expenditure, they went away and designed something that never mentioned National, never mentioned Don Brash, but attacked the Greens, and attacked the Labour Party for its health policies and its defence policies—and it was untrue. But worse than that, the names of the people at the addresses given for the promoters of these pamphlets were illusory. These people did not exist; these people did not live at these addresses. I went to one of the addresses in Christchurch; it was an empty house. So the Exclusive Brethren even used—or abused—the existing laws by not being upfront and honest about who they were and what they were trying to do. They were part of a pattern of behaviour in that election campaign that I do not think bodes very well for our country.

I would be prepared to say that the Labour Government did not get it right with the electoral finance legislation we put in place, and it is welcome that the House is now moving into a space where we have general broad agreement. Although Labour does not agree with the whole thing, we are supporting a package of reform here. I think that perhaps Labour did go a bit too far with its legislation but it was in response to an extreme example of behaviour. I guess we tried to cover off all of the loopholes that we knew that people would drive a bus through if they were given an opportunity. So I think it is important that we have expenditure caps, and that we have legislation that can be enforced to ensure that that practice never happens again.

METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) Link to this

I will take a quite brief, perhaps, call on the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill. These issues have been canvassed a great deal in the past with the Electoral Finance Act a few years ago, and now with this bill. I thank all of those who worked on this legislation, and all of the officials, who did a very good job dealing with three lots of bills at the same time. We had the MMP referendum bill, this electoral finance reform bill, and the Parliamentary Service bill at the same time—so there was a range of officials doing various parts of the work, and the advice in the Electoral Legislation Committee was excellent and very helpful. The process itself was very interesting. We had some interesting clauses such as the wood clause in this legislation, which means that the wood used for putting up billboards is no longer considered to be an election expense. There was lots of passionate discussion about where the wood for particular hoardings comes from. Sometimes these processes get just a little odd on occasion—that being one example.

I make particular note of the Supplementary Order Paper that the Green Party has put forward on Part 1 to reduce the donation disclosure limits currently in the bill. The donation disclosure limit is the threshold at which parties and candidates are required to disclose to the public who has given them donations. In previous times it was $1,500 for a candidate, if I remember rightly—I might have that wrong—but in any event this legislation has increased that threshold. It is now easier for candidates and for political parties to hide the source of the money donated to them for their election campaign. The only argument put forward as to why it was necessary to make it easier for political parties to potentially engage in more corrupt practices—frankly, that is what that is—is all of the other financial limits in the rest of the bill, like the limit that a candidate could spend, for example, went up. The logic that everything else went up so why not put this one up as well is ridiculous. It is absolutely irrational.

The purpose of having a low disclosure threshold for donations is so that the public know who is giving money to candidates and political parties so they can assess whether there is some form of payback likely or possible in the party or candidates’ policy should they be elected to Parliament. It has nothing to do with whether candidates should be able to spend more. We can have that argument over here. It has nothing to do with the fact that the public are entitled to the highest levels of transparency and to a system that is always striving to be the least corrupt that it can be and to have the highest levels of integrity that it can have. What this legislation is doing, amongst a number of very good things such as the spending cap for third parties, which the Greens support, is enabling candidates and political parties to engage in a greater level of potential corrupt practice, and that cannot be acceptable. It is not acceptable to the public and it should not be acceptable to this House; we should not be passing legislation that allows this to happen. This is a very, very serious concern that was dismissed in large part by the members of the select committee across the board, as far as I understand, particularly those from ACT and National. Obviously they do not mind that we have a less transparent system, and they do not mind that we have a system that has a great deal less integrity, particularly when it comes to transparency for the public about where political parties are getting the money from.

We have also seen recently the same issue being raised at local government level. My colleague Russel Norman has legislation that would require the same levels of disclosure at local body election level as is required for MPs and for parties, so that the public know who donates money to local government, local body election campaigns, and candidates. It is quite right that that happens. I say, again, that we cannot allow, or continue to allow, political players to seek and to receive donations from interests that may, in fact, be paying this money in order to get policy kickbacks later on. That is the threat. That is why we have a significant regime that protects the integrity of the system. We need that in local government as well as at central government level, and, as I said, the Green Party has a member’s bill that will do that. We hope that in time it comes up in the ballot and we can have that debate.

It makes it very difficult to look at making those changes at a local government level when, even at this level in terms of the general election, some of the parties in this Chamber appeared to have allowed this change to happen. So the Green Party has put forward a Supplementary Order Paper to reduce the disclosure thresholds from $1,500 to $1,000 for a candidate, and from $15,000 to $1,000 for a party. We sincerely hope that other political parties support this amendment and make a stand in favour of transparency, of honest, healthy politics, and of a situation where the public can continue to have faith in the integrity of our system. As members of Parliament and as political parties we continually seek to improve the integrity of the system. Unfortunately, this legislation fails to do that. It erodes the integrity of the system and erodes the faith and trust that the public have in us to set the rules for how we operate and what benefits us in a way that preferably benefits them more. That is not what we are doing with the change in this legislation.

I sincerely ask and hope that MPs and parties across the House support the Green Party’s Supplementary Order Paper to lower the disclosure thresholds for transparency of donors to political parties and to candidates. Thank you.

Hon JOHN BOSCAWEN (Deputy Leader—ACT) Link to this

The ACT Party will be opposing the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill at the Committee stage, but I will start by acknowledging that there was a proposal that the three bills to be discussed today should have been debated together. Although the Hon Lianne Dalziel referred to the fact that she and Labour would have preferred the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill, the Parliamentary Service Amendment Bill, and the Electoral Referendum Bill to be discussed together, I will put on the record that the ACT Party was the party, or one of the parties, that objected to that. We see a very big difference particularly between the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill and the Electoral Referendum Bill, although there are some issues that relate to both bills.

The first point we would like to make is that we congratulate National and the Hon Simon Power on the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill. Let us acknowledge that absolutely up front, because the provisions in this bill are a very, very far cry from Labour’s original Electoral Finance Act. Let us not forget the history of the Electoral Finance Act; I noticed that Lianne Dalziel was happy to talk about the unpleasant 2005 election campaign, which I will come back to later, but the genesis of this bill was the moves by Labour prior to the last election to put in place a new regime on electoral finance and the conduct of elections. We should not forget the fact that one of the fundamental provisions of the original Electoral Finance Bill, when it went out to the public for submission, was a requirement that if any single person or organisation other than a candidate or a political party wanted to speak out in opposition to any other political candidate, before they so much as spent a single dollar, they had to sign a certificate before a justice of the peace. That is hard to comprehend, but that is what the Labour politicians in this Parliament prior to the 2008 election voted for when they voted for the first reading of the then Labour Government’s Electoral Finance Bill. They said to the people of New Zealand that if they wanted to have any right to free speech and to participate in the election, they had to make a submission. The Labour Government said that as a very minimum it wanted those people to sign a certificate before a justice of the peace. There was a very significant demonstration of objection to that bill.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker) Link to this

I say to members who will be making a contribution to debate on this part that it is about the nuts and the bolts of the bill. Some speeches have bordered more on being second and third reading speeches, but I have been tolerant today.

Hon JOHN BOSCAWEN (Deputy Leader—ACT) Link to this

I will take a brief call, in particular on clause 27 of the Electoral (Finance Reform and Advance Voting) Amendment Bill. Clause 27 deals with the transitional provisions relating to donations. We had a contribution from Metiria Turei from the Green Party on the issue of donations; this clause raises the issue of why we actually disclose donations at all and, as a consequence, why we need clause 27, or any provisions relating to donations.

I am surprised that National members did not take the opportunity to speak on the first part of this bill, because in the last week we have seen a classic instance relating to donations. We are arguing whether a party should have to disclose donations of $10,000 or more, or of $15,000 or more. But what have we had from the Labour Party? Its candidate for the Auckland mayoralty has disclosed in the last week that his funds were paid into a separate trust, and that trust wrote a cheque. It was not for $10,000 or $15,000. How much do Labour members think it was for? It was for half a million dollars.